Entrepreneurial Mindset as a "plus-and" to the T-shaped Engineer
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From the 2016 KEEN Winter Conference: Ross Lee, professor at Villanova University explains how the entrepreneurial mindset is a "plus-and" to the "T-shaped" skillset. Learn more at www.EngineeringUnleashed.com/keen
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Entrepreneurial Mindset as a "plus-and" to the T-shaped Engineer
- 1. T-Shaped Engineers: Connecting the Entrepreneurial Mindset Ross Lee, PhD Villanova University
- 2. KEEN Foundations An early T-shaped Engineer: Bob Kern
- 3. The “Entrepreneurial Mindset” “About our changing world……..” “Integrating information from many different sources to gain insights” “Finding unexpected opportunities to create value”
- 4. Voice of Industry on “Intrapreneurship”
- 5. Key Competency Areas Related To T-shaped Skills 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
- 6. T-Shaped Education n ineerin iscip ine Indi idua u ture e ion epth ross u ture ross e ion readth ross iscip ine ea readth ho e syste s fu spectru perspecti e • Jim Spohrer and Phil Gardner (T-Summit 2015) • Providing full spectrum vision
- 7. rin in in the 3 ’s
- 8. Building T-Shaped Skills • Web Engineering Vision • Leadership of Ventures Course • Joe Tranquillo 2013 ASEE paper • Cross Discipline Education • Xiadong Zou 2012 ASEE paper • Depth and breadth tailoring
- 9. Implications for Engineering Education • Preserve the right depth in the stem of the T – Preserve and strengthen the core discipline education and experiences • Assist in selecting electives to help build the crossbar breadth – Provide guidance in meeting distribution requirements • Provide explicit cross disciplinary experiences – Build off the experiential opportunities that exist in many areas • Provide a collaborative focused, internship – Build the desired learning outcome right into the job description
- 10. Focused Internship Spring 2015 • Joint y desi ned between a pbe ’s and Vi ano a • Key learning outcomes incorporated into job description: – Engineering expertise (depth) • Understanding the science and engineering basis for the problem • Demonstrates data based problem analysis and problem solution skills – Cross-discipline; cross-culture; business and customer value (breadth) • Understanding consumer value and business opportunity associated with technology solutions • Engages with and communicates in cross-functional teams • Success with exposure to IP, new business opportunities, cross functional teamwork and leadership • Commitment to renew in Summer 2016
- 11. Key Take Aways • Industry views T-shaped as a critical attribute for innovation and intrapreneurship • Building these skills typically involve experiential cross discipline instruction • Tailored internships offer a way to test and validate successful T- shaped development
- 12. Discussion • Take a couple of minutes to jot down where you see opportunities for building T-shaped skills in your individual engineering programs. Also jot down any established strengths for building these skills. • As a group capture the top opportunities as, well as the top strengths, for building T-shaped skills in engineering programs. Add these to the slide at the table and be prepared to have a person report back on this.
Editor's Notes
- This is the industry team we assembled to understand how intrapreneurship is being practiced today. The group represents a broad cross section of companies and institutions from leading materials providers such as DuPont and BASF to recognized innovation leaders such as Lockheed Martin and their “Skunkworks” to IBM and their leadership in patents to consumer products companies such as these companies to smaller companies such as this medical device company and Pankow construction, and finally to including the Air Force as a government institution leveraging the associations fostered with this institution via the University of Dayton.
- These were the key areas identified by asking the over 100 corporate leaders involved, “what behaviors and competencies do you want in your new engineers that would make them more effective innovators and intrapreneurs in your company?” We are going to focus on T-shaped that addresses several of these areas. Animation. These are the six areas that are most closely associated with and addressed by T-shaped skills. Technical confidence comes from the depth of technology skills in the stem of the T. Anthropology comes from the ability to engage across social disciplines and represents part of the top of the T as does cross pollination, which is the ability to understand and apply solutions across disciplines and perspectives. Other areas related to the top of the T are communications and value propositions, that is the ability to convey the business significance of technology solutions, and teamwork, that is the ability to engage and work effectively with people of different skills, disciplines, cultures and backgrounds.
- So what do we mean by T-shaped? “T-Shaped People” is a term coined over 20 years ago by David Guest as it applied to a rounded person equally comfortable with information systems technology and management techniques. Jim Spohrer, at IBM, and Phil Gardner at Michigan State University, have recently emphasized the critical need for T-shaped professionals to face the challenges of the future, and have emphasized, as our intrapreneurship study has, the critical need to develop these skills in our educational processes. These authors used this image with a stem comprised of depth in at least one discipline and system, and a crossbar comprised of breadth including the competencies needed to understand, engage, communicate, contribute to, and lead innovation in today’s multidiscipline, global systems. Other icons for the T-shaped have emphasized similar T-stem depth and T-crossbar breadth. One criticism of this icon is the conveyance of orthogonality in the intersection of the stem and cross bar instead of a complementary synergy. So we came up with a new T-shaped icon. This is modeled off of Maxwell’s experiment in the nineteenth century that showed the complementary addition of primary colors to produce white light. So what is designated here is a T-shaped engineer with the stem comprising the discipline depth and the cross bar comprising cross culture, cross region, cross discipline and team breadth. Just like Maxwell’s experiment the parts of the T are additive and only by combining them does one achieve the full spectrum vision that is so important for “seeing” intrapreneurial opportunities. We are using this same icon to articulate the benefits of our graduate program in sustainable engineering where the cross bar breadth includes a whole systems perspective including social, political and economic aspects in addition to the discipline engineering and environmental perspectives.
- So how do we build T-shaped skills in the educational process. Just as the T-summit focused on, there is much good work that is going on and has been done to build these skills. Stanford incorporates T-shaped right into its Engineering Vision as articulated on its web pages. It’s Leadership of Ventures course focuses on building T-shaped skills via interdisciplinary projects, instructors and experiences. Bucknell’s Joe Tranquillo, who is presenting the next paper in our session today, presented an excellent paper at the 2013 annual ASEE conference describing cross discipline educational opportunities to develop T-shaped skills. One striking example was a signals course for biomedical engineering that challenged engineers to produce music using biological signals and forced interdisciplinary engagements and learning. And Xiadong Zou, who a presented a paper at the 2012 annual ASEE conference, and articulated the need to focus on fewer areas for increasing depth and requiring cross discipline electives to develop breadth.
- So what do we recommend? We need to build on what has already been done. Preserve the right depth of the stem. Keep doing what is right in the discipline education. Assist in selecting electives to help build the crossbar, top of the T, breadth. Continue to provide explicit cross disciplinary experiences and something that has not been done, provide a collaborative, focused internship to test and further build these skills.
- As an example of this, Villanova and Campbell’s jointly designed an internship with the desired key learning outcomes explicitly incorporated into the job description. These included these two outcomes relating to engineering expertise depth for the stem of the T; and these two outcomes relating to stakeholder value and cross discipline engagement for cross bar breadth. We initiated this internship in the Spring of 2015. Our student, Nick Fonzo, was a junior chemical engineer who was in his third semester of Villanova’s Engineering Entrepreneurship minor. At the end of the internship we assessed success. Some of the things that went well included the exposure to intellectual property, new business opportunities and excitement as well as exposure to cross functional teams and leadership. Some of the things that did not go as well was attempting to combine an internship with academic course work. It was hard to schedule beneficial opportunities for development around must attend or participate in academic items. In the future we will look to do these as summer or full time academic year interns.
- In conclusion. The collaborative process worked exceedingly well to engage four institutions with complimentary strengths with a cross breadth of industries and institutions for intrapreneurship learning’s. We achieved a very solid understanding of the key competency areas associated with strong intrapreneurship in today’s businesses and institutions. To build these competencies it makes sense to focus on key areas such as T-shaped skills and confidence, that you will be hearing more about today and to build of the work that has been done and is going on today. A new opportunity for the future is to jointly design internships with specific desired learning outcomes specified in the job description. The ultimate assessment of the success of these educational efforts will be in the future accomplishments of such trained engineers to bring about intrapreneurship as they tackle the daunting problems of the future. A key challenge is to develop measures and assessments for the educational steps along the way. One way to do this may be to use rubrics, such as the VALUE rubrics developed by the AACU and clearly articulated, for T-shaped skills, in a paper presented by Debra Humphreys at the 2015 T-Summit in March.